Reflective Essays on Teaching Experiences

Final Reflective Essay on Teaching and LearningI have learned three things from my student teaching experience: effective pedagogy, classroom management, and humility. In this expository essay I will briefly explain each of the above-mentioned and explain why it is important. Among foreign language teachers, there is debate about how to most effectively teach. The debate can be simplified to two pedagogical approaches; grammarbased vs. immersion-based.

The grammar approach to learning a foreign language is traditional and still the dominate pedagogy in use today. If you took French, German, or Spanish in high school, this is how you were taught. The grammar approach is a mechanical approach to language-learning and has advantages and disadvantages. For example, if I am teaching a student the verb “to go,” I would write the various forms on the board: I go, you go, he/she goes, etc.. I would then direct students to practice this verb through written or spoken activities. When I think that I have adequately taught the verb, I would likely give a formative assessment to check student comprehension. And so it goes, piece by piece, I put together a language for my students.

The advantage of this approach is that it is simple and very comprehensible. It’s like putting together a puzzle, one piece at a time. Students do not experience tremendous anxiety and do not feel lost in a sea of incomprehensible words. The principle disadvantage of this approach is that it is slow to build fluency. For those of you who took a foreign language in high school or even college, how much do you really remember now?

The solution to the problem of fluency is immersion. One form of controlled immersion is called “TPRS,” and is the focus of the next few paragraphs. Language teachers and learners know that the key component to learning a foreign language is to travel abroad and live in that country. Teachers began experimenting with ways to duplicate this powerful learning experience...